This was author and innovator Lou Poulas’ introduction last year, “While Grey and Rudy do a great job of breaking down everything you need to know for 2011 fantasy baseball, drafts still trip me up. I’ve been lamenting my inadequacies from the past 3+ years which resulted in an inordinate amount of time number crunching in Excel. My quest – a draft day “war room” that allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse of the league while minimizing my effort. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to keep track of more things as opposed to fewer.”

Presenting the free 2011 Fantasy Baseball War Room. It’s an auto-updating Excel workbook that keeps track of all the necessaries:

Unfortunately, Lou was inundated with real work this year but was kind enough to allow me to make updates for 2011.

This year’s version has been slightly customized to Razzball:

The Players page lists players in order of Grey’s top 300 with Grey’s projections. CHONE was not publicly available this year. FanGraphs stepped to the plate and graciously provided projections for players unranked by Grey. Several hundred additional unranked players were filled with Marcel projections.

The “Dashboard” displays players by position in order of Grey’s rankings.

The ‘Team Rank’ box (League Standings) is limited to no more than 12 teams. Projected ‘Batting Totals’ and ‘Pitching Totals’ extend up to 25 teams.

Up to 25 players may be drafted per team (allocations set by the user via the ‘User Input’ page).

I have left the spreadsheet ‘unprotected’ so you may overlay with your own projections if you like.

The value of the War Room, for me, is to load the picks of a draft to determine which categories I am falling short in. In this manner, I can keep adding/deleting targeted players until I consistently get a strong team.

Click on the ‘Notes’ tab for instructions for how to load league team names, etc. Put questions and comments in this post and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I used an excel spreadsheet for last year’s draft; I won the league! The thing about using a sheet like this that puts projections up in there and adds up what your team totals is that it tempers your know-it-all-ism and makes sure that you don’t just go with a million young guys who you lurve, and that you have a nice balanced team. Remember, you should have a few long shots, but in the draft, it is most essential to get solid good guys. Week-to-week ups and down are for the wire.

This may be a stupid question, but when you say auto-updating does that imply that I am manually inputing the players as they are drafted in my league? And if so, where do I input this? If not, how does it know who has been drafted?

@Denys: You get all of the stats for up to 25 teams. It is just the ‘Team Rank’ box that is limited to the 12 teams (which I added beyond Lou’s original spreadsheet). You have the flexibility to add lines, copy, paste, etc. if you want.
@Chris: Recommend testing this in mocks before using in a live draft. I find it too challenging if the pick time is short.
@Broccoli Roberts: Check out the instructions on the ‘Notes’ page. Basically, you enter team names to the User Input page, go to the players page, then when you hover a cell it gives you a down arrow to select one of the teams to assign to the player–hover, next to the player you want and select the team picking that player. Then go to the dashboard to see which players have been selected already and also to the War Room for results.

Great tool but needs a little tweak… the projected ranks don’t work correctly… the lower the number the lower the rank. For instance if a team had the lowest whip say 1.14 they would be listed as being 12th not first. Likewise all the rankings seem to reflect the same logic in the formula. The bigger the number the higher the rank. Works for some cats but completely wrong for others.

Awesome! This tool was invaluable last year. One question, where do you put the auction price paid for each player? On the user input tab it asks for total monies ($260) but on the players tab there is no place to put actual cost at auction.

@NewBVick: Absoulutely, yes. Just save the spreadsheet under a new name and overlay your numbers on top of what is there.
@Dusty: @Brandon: I forwarded an auction_blank to Grey for posting. Unfortunately, I have no experience so even though I THINK it is functional, you guys will have to validate that. I didn’t pre-load with values (which you will have to do) since I don’t have the knowledge base.
@Eddy: Eddy, I love you man, BUT I am not willing to take that extra step (have poured a ton of blood into this already). Lou has made this about as seemless as possible. If you are really spreadsheet challenged, this might be tougher for you, AND I know you are plenty smart enough to get there. Try the step by step in the notes, and I will try to answer questions here.

I remember people playing around with it last year, but is there any way to swap categories or just add in categories? Say adding Holds and swapping AVG for OBP for example.
Like Eddy the war room simultaneously amazes and confounds me.
Thanks for the hard work!

Make sure you’re viewing the full screen size of Excel by going to View and then clicking Full Screen Mode (I wasn’t seeing tabs and it took me like 10 minutes to figure out this was why, because I’m an idiot).

Beyond that I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Go to the User Input tab and enter the names of all the teams in your league. Then check out the Players tab. Notice that next to the player’s name there’s an Owner column. You should now be able to click on that and get a dropdown menu that will allow you to assign each player to one of the teams in your league. Play around with that a little for S&Gs and then check out the War Room and Dashboard tabs. In the War Room you’ll notice things changing as players get assigned to teams, and in the Dashboard tab you’ll notice guys’ names getting crossed out as their assigned.

@PepeSilvia: Thanks! You guys keep helping each other however you can.

BTW: If you look at the Players page at the columns at the top, you will see that they ‘skip’ from M to U, for example. The columns actually exist and are hidden. they carry formulas which we don’t really want you to mess with. However, if you highlight from L to W, right click, you can ‘unhide’ to view the formulas. Do so at your own risk!

This tool is a lot of fun to play around with. Unfortunately it can be kind of stressful to use during a draft. If you start to fall behind and miss a drafted player because you are shuffling around a bunch of cheat sheets, it throws off all the numbers/projections. I was about halfway through my draft last year and stopped using it because I missed a couple player prices in my auction league. You have to be quick with the “find” tool and pay close attention to everything that’s happening the entire draft or you’ll screw it up.

@Swagger Jackers: Totally agree. Find it best in mocks to discover weaknesses and fortify. Be ready with replacement players for targeted at the draft. If you have more time between picks, then go ahead with a real draft.

Is there an AL only version and an NL only version of this? Or should i just go in and delete the players names (will that mess up any formulas?) Also, what does “Column G” (Proj 12 TM) on the “Players” Tab represent?

Awesome tool – I’ve created some pretty complex spreadsheets to track my drafts but this takes the cake.

Two questions/obseervations:

On the “Players” tab I’ve unhidden the salary column. When I enter a player onto a team and give them a salary Justin Upton through Mark Reynolds get greyed out and crossed off on this page. None of the other hitters or pitchers do this. Was the intent to have this functionality for all players on this page?

On the “War Room” tab the formulas in cells C46-G46 were not copied down properly so rows 45 and 46 are both divided by row 5. This messes up the batting stats and subsequent ranks. Can you fix and repost?

Ok so it seems like once you input the team names it becomes more apparent how to use this thing. That’s basically what i’m taking from your answer. Definitely going to give it a shot this year. Last year I was a little overwhelmed by it. Thanks Eddy and everyone else involved.

@peter: @peter: Just a heads up. Check funtional impact on other pages as you make initial entries to make sure what you intend to happen is actually occurring (before you do a bunch of entry.
@M.D.: No AL/NL only versions. If you create one, keep in mind sharing with all as a downloadable to Grey. The ‘Players’ tab just means that one is on the Players page. This is the page where one assigns the team to the player that they selected. Think you should be able to just delete players names without affecting the functionality. As with anything/everything–test it!

@Chris R: No immediate solution to the position limit issue. On the War Room page one can ‘assign’ positions to his own team, but that’s it. It does leave issues. I pay close attention to the number of players taken at say R22 (13 hitters/9 pitchers)(someone will leave C for R 25). If there isn’t a balance, I drop excess players and go to the next round for any team that is not in balance. Think this necessary to get a true reading. Sorry, that part cumbersome, but worth it given all of the work that you put into it otherwise.

Gents – for those having difficulty keeping up in a draft, definitely try and utilize the CTRL-F function in excel. Basic excel work, but many don’t know it. This is the find feature – hit control and the f key at the same time and it brings up a dialogue box. Type the player you want in the dialogue box and it will automatically bring you to that section of the worksheet.

I am faily savvy in excel and can’t use it for auto online drafts that have 60 second time limits. HOWEVER, you can put in the league afterward and very easily see where your relative weak spots are and focus on some solid trades.

@Matt: Good Catch! I love you guys–and hate you guys. I have spent @%^& hours on this, for you guys to find errors in two minutes! All-in-all, we will all be thankful for the searching eyes and solid tool!!!

Am forwarding the correction. Grey will have posted soon I am sure–for your further testing!

If anyone is looking for something similar that can be used with additional categories, here is a spreadsheet (Excel 2007, I believe) I made last year. I haven’t done any updates yet for 2011, but should be getting to it shortly when I have a little extended period of free time. In the meantime, check out the 2010 version to see what you think.

I agree with the above poster that using something like this can almost be a detriment (to keep track of EVERY team) if the draft is moving at a quick pace, but certainly works easily for your own team and is a great way to take a snapshot of projected standings after the draft to see what areas of strength/weakness are, as well as a simple pre-draft tool to project what different combinations of players will give you.

@simply fred: This is an amazing tool. Whoever is smart enough to use it will get a great big advantage. Sadly, I’m going to have to rock it Old Skool and stick with Grey’s Top 300, a wing, and a prayer.

@Brandon: I don’t believe that this version populates auction values. I would suggest using a tier system and your best judgement. however, since it is in excel, it would be fairly easy to enter in your own auction values by simply adding a new column. I’m planning on doing that and creating an AL only / NL only spread sheet once the V3 comes out.

Great job, Fred – thanks for all the hard work.
In keeping with the general tone, I’ve found this maybe not so useful in snake drafts, although if you have enough time it’s a good way of keeping track of where YOUR team is at.

Where it really came into its own for me was during my auction draft. Makes it really easy to keep track of how much you’ve spent and, if you can keep up with the play, how much everyone else has spent. Managed to get a few players I wanted for not much at the end of the draft because I knew fairly accurately how much everyone had left.

Think I might have found a small bug. On the War Room Tab, columns KLM row 46 references $C5 and it should reference $C6. $C5 is repeated from above row 45. This gives rows 45 and 46 the same value and shifts the subsequent values so the team above is getting the wins saves and Ks of the team below.

Think I might have found a small bug. On the War Room Tab, columns KLM row 46 references $C5 and it should reference $C6. $C5 is repeated from above row 45. This gives rows 45 and 46 the same value and shifts the subsequent values so the team above is getting the wins saves and Ks of the team below.

That is not to say that this isn’t totally cool, which it is. Many blessings upon you.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s a great tool. I agree with those that have said that it is difficult to keep up with the whole thing for an online snake draft. However, I have found tools like this very useful by only keeping up on my picks and those of a couple of owners that I know always put together good teams. Last year in my 14 team league I did my team and two other teams and had plenty of time to talk trash in the online chat.

Is there any way to remove extra teams from the drop down list on the players tabs? I entered 12 team names in the user input… but am I still forced to pick from the 25 team slots? Deleting the extra teams just caused errors

Any word on the updated version? This is a great tool, i actually created one last year, that had a tab for each team, that way i could see which positions each team still needed. This is a little more advanced, but may be able to be integrated into this spreadsheet.

My trade instincts are horrible. It kills my game. I can’t look at a trade proposal and see it spatially so I use auction values to measure trades. So for example if I have a sum of $28 in player value, I expect the other guy to give me $28 of value back. My question is this, is that a reasonable way of going about it as long as I use a Razzball auction values and tweak the dollars with any changing circumstances such as a player having a better than projected season?

@Combo: Go to the tab called, “players” and unhide column AY. When you see all the extra teams, select them all and choose, “delete and shift cells up” That seems to have worked for me without breaking anything.

Thanks, this spreadsheet is great. My league has auction values that go up every half million, so we can draft someone for 1.5 rather than 1 or 2. However, this spreadsheet automatically rounds up any .5s to the next numbers. Is there a way to fix that?

@simply fred: Yes, I’m working on inserting the auction values from Razzball’s point shares. (I was also hoping to put ESPN values in there, adjacent, so that we of Razzball Nation can see what our opponents are probably looking at for each player. However, I don’t think the ESPN values are available yet.) I’ll update this thread when I have something.

@peter: which point shares will you be using? I know there are different categories. Can you possibly just add a tab that has all of the different point shares? This way we can just copy and paste the type we want to use (in my case 12 team AL only 5×5, and 12 team NL only 5×5)

@JE: i created an AL only version, pretty simple, just go to the players tab and “sort” by the TEAM column, then just simply delete all of the NL TEAMs. keep in mind that only the top 300 players have the teams loaded in, so the bottom players (that are not in blue font), i just left on their in alphabetical order. You have to go through and delete each individual player off of the dashboard tab however.

@JE: I am going to e-mail it to fred (and ill copy you) once I complete. I had it completed on the last “version” that was posted, but they posted a new version. So i’m going to wait until they finalize this before i do that work again.

(going by Matt #2 from here on, since I noticed there another “Matt” had previously posted)

@ dsimon

Yeah, needs to be sorted alphabetically for the VLOOKUP. When I get an updated version done, I think I need to leave some of it unprotected so the sort function will work, etc… as I don’t think as is, User changes would be possible.

I actually forgot what the password was (making it useless) since I haven’t used it in almost a year, but spent some time today getting things figured out and I think (hope) I have it back up and running so I can update it for 2011 without any programming issues.

@ M.D.

I will post an updated version when I get some 2011 projections added. Probably use the RotoChamp ones on FanGraphs, ESPN, and I can add the Razzball ones for the 5×5 categories. If it’s not too much of an hassle for me to add in additional ones, I’ll try to get the ZiPS and/or FANS one from FG as well. I want to check over a couple of other little details as well, but it was running bug-free last year as far as I know.

OK, I did a poor job of communication requests to Grey. He has been updating (not creating new). so, the first two listing are for 12-teams, snake and auction. I asked him to ADD a 25-team snake. Am holding off on updating the 12-team and adding a 25-team auction until Peter can fill with values. (not even sure if Grey can handle adding more options…)

Fred – simply awesome! you da man! And I am proud of you.
However, I am a bit too old to learn new tricks. I will rely on intuition, drafting patterns, waiver and trade acumen, eidedic memory (well at least Sandra once had it, but long gone), and Steven Hawking as my advisor. (Or I will do the opposite of whatever Klarabell advises. That works almost as well:). It will be like Garry Kasparov challenging Deep Blue Computer.
Sadly, Deep Blue won the match, and Garry had a tantrum. If I lose to you, I promise I will concede in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Beardawg’s issue (#86) is that those fields need all 12 (or more) teams with at least one assigned hitter and pitcher so that it can average on the full set of teams (required). The spreadsheet won’t average fewer teams.

Most kibitzers are expecting James Shields to bounce back some this year thus making him a decent lake round pick. The reason being the fact that he was very unlucky in 2010. In reading player profiles for both hitters and pitchers this seems to be a common remark explaining why so and so will be better this year. Is this theory correct? What I never see is purts giving me any historical examples of this and what the actual percentage is of players who were unlucky the year before bouncing back the next. Your thoughts.

Draft in a hour! Please Help! Guys, I can’t figure out how to load selected players onto teams within the war room. I am guessing I am probably missing something, but this is my first time messing around with this application and I have a draft in an hour! Help is greatly greatly appreciated!

@RamRod: there is a good bit of credibility to such a theory, but not without exceptions and some determining factors. by looking at certain stats – especially BABIP, LD% and FB/HR% for hitters and FIP vs. ERA, BABIP and FB/HR% for pitchers – uncharacteristic numbers are easy to spot. by looking at career averages vs. the disappointing season you can see the difference. for a young player like shields, a bounceback is perfectly feasible. however, be careful with bounceback candidates who are aging – don’t confuse diminishing ability for bad luck.

@Kevin: Kevin, I just checked in. Looks like I missed your deadline. If one starts with the Notes tab, I think it explains the process. Basically, you need to go to the User Input tab, enter the team names and set the parameters (#of hitters/pitchers). then go to the Players page, hover over the arrow next to the player picked and select the picking team from the dropdown. The follow progress on dashboard and war room.

All of the names and “white” category stats are editable and the Sort function is available now as well. There are 4 different systems loaded at the moment (room for 5 total). Not all the category options are available on every system, but these could be filled in by the user. ESPN Projections are the only one 100% with all category options. One of the easiest ones to do is Quality Starts, as all that is needed is the projected number of Games Started. The yellow projection system is completely free for user entered projections (or another system) on this version.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. With a basic understanding of manipulating Excel, it is pretty easy to get projections loaded on there yourself.

@Matt #2: Matt, Very nice spreadsheet. One quick question. When i change the “projection system” on the Setup tab, I’m guessing that the header and stat lines should change in the batter and pitchers tab. however, they seem to consistently stay @ ESPN. (No matter what projection system you select, the output seems to be from ESPN).

I’m not 100% on this because I haven’t dived into your spreadsheet yet, but I think if you include a ,0 at the end of the vlookup, the list doesn’t have to be sorted. For example: =vlookup(A1, B1:D100, 3, 0) Give it a shot, might make things easier.

The output changes with the change to projection system. What you are looking at on the Batters & Pitchers tabs isn’t the output, just the tables for the output in the Draft Entry portion. If your scroll down the B & P, you’ll see the other projection systems.

You are correct in that you can setup the VLOOKUP function in a way that the data doesn’t need to be in alphabetical order. I think I have tried it both ways in the past with other things, and it works a lot better for this sort of data lookup the way it is. For this particular spreadsheet, if you add some players, it only takes a few seconds to resort them anyways. The issue I noted earlier in the comments had to do the protection feature, which I have since changed to allow sorting.

@Matt #2: oh that makes sense, thank you very much. Your spreadsheet is extremely useful. I am going to try to make add another worksheet in order to track finances, and then i think this will be complete. and thanks so much for the change… HAHAHA!

@Matt #2: Hey Matt #2, I am trying to “copy and paste” player names and projections into the “TBD Projections” that was left blank on the batters and pitchers tab. However it gives me a “spreadsheet protected” error. and i do not have the password… Any insight? My email is m.murphy.22@hotmail.com (if you don’t want to post it publicly).

There shouldn’t be any copy/paste issues as all of the cells that you need to input data into are unlocked for that purpose.

The easiest way (and how I do it myself) to enter new data is to set everything up on a separate spreadsheet and then copy/paste the data into the table on the Draft Tracker.

Assuming that maybe you have another set of projections you would like to enter? You need to get it setup on a spreadsheet and move the columns so that they matchup with the Name+14 categories for Hitters and Name+11 categories for pitchers. Then you can Copy & Paste Special (values) into the TBD Projections, for example.

Some finesse and/or reverse engineering might be needed to get each of the categories and you can setup formulas in your own spreadsheet and then Copy/Paste Special (values) the column onto itself to eliminate the formula from cell leaving just the value.

Don’t know if that is too confusing or not (it’s pretty easy once you know what you’re doing), but I’m happy to help out with whatever you need and would rather just hash it out on here so that anyone else with the same question(s) can follow along.

@Matt #2: Sounds great Matt #2, I will simply set up a separate spreadsheet. What i was hoping to do, was use the projections that Simply Fred had put on his War Room Spreadsheet. I wish to use the Razzball projections (as i feel they are the most accurate), however, your spreadsheet only has the top 300 Razzball projections (as that is all that they ranked). I wanted to add the additional projections that simply fred added to his spreadsheet for players that Grey didn’t project. For example, Julio Borbon (SAGNOF), is not included in the Razzball projections, because he does not rank in the top 300. however he will be drafted in all AL only leagues.

Gotcha. Let me know if you any help with the Excel functions. I use the “Text to Columns” function under the “Data” menu and then the “Concatenate” formula function to get the names in the First/Last format. You obviously need to formulate Hits and add in the extra columns as well.

I will update the version on Google Docs to allow for up to 500 batters and 500 pitchers in the Yellow sections (give me a few minutes to load that). If you have more than that, narrow it down on your own sheet before you load them in.

It won’t take me long to do this all myself and I’ll go ahead an update the Razzball one to include more than just the top 300, but it would probably be good practice to familiarize yourself with the procedure so you have more flexibility in the future.

@Matt #2: I’d love to say im as handy in excel as you are, i can use the text to columns function, however, i do not know how you get the excel sheet to formulate hits. also, i do not know how you get the player names to show up in the drop down bar. I guess i need a little brush up on my excel knowledge. haha. Your help is greatly appreciated!!!!

For hits (or ER, etc…) Insert a column for hits, plug in the appropriate formula using the other appropriate columns (in this case, AB*AVG). Copy the formula to the other rows. Highlight the column and Copy/Paste Special (values).

For the names, here is an example….as you did, highlight the column with the names (Dunn, Adam) and use the Text to Columns function (Delimited, comma). This will give you two columns, Dunn & Adam. Adam will have a leading space, so highlight that column and Find [hit space bar once] & Replace [leave blank]. Then, in a blank column, enter the formula

=concatenate(C2,” “,B2)

this would be if Dunn is cell B2 and Adam in C2

copy the formula down then do the copy/paste special thing again

insert or cut/insert cut cells and move the columns around so they match up in the left to right order (for batters)….

Player,AB,H,R,1B,2B,3B,HR,RBI,BB,K,HBP,SAC,SB,CS (15 columns)

then Copy that data (15 columns wide by a max of 500 rows) and Paste Special (values) into the Draft Tracker under the Batters Tab in the TBD table (yellow one)

They will automatically show up in the drop down bar on the Draft Entry for whatever projection system is selected.

@Matt #2: Matt 2: I did exactly what your directions stated above, and I still receive this error “The cell or chart that you are trying to change is protected and therefore read-only. to modify a protected cell or chart, first remove protection using the Inprotect Sheet commend (review tab, changes group). You may be prompted for a password”. And when I try, I am prompted for a password. I believe it is because i am trying to past the names in the “Player Column” and that column is locked, as well as the columns. I’ve tried multiple times, and keep getting the same error message.

For those interested, I entered the projected dollar values according to Razzball’s Point Shares for 12 Team auctions into the War Room (auction). I included both the $260 budget and the 180/80 hitting/pitching values. I’ve put them in the “Players” tab and posted JUST THAT TAB as a Google Doc:

If you want the dollar values (12 team) in your Auction War Room, copy and paste the appropriate columns from the Google Doc (G/H for hitters, U/V for pitchers) into your War Room at home. Since all of the players are ordered the same (Grey’s rankings) in both the downloadable War Room and Google Doc, everything will line up correctly. I pasted mine in place of columns G and AA on the War Room (Auction) spreadsheet, and it hasn’t impacted any of the functionality.

Also, here is an optional update pak that contains all of the players as listed in the War Room. One could narrow the lists down to the players they wanted and load them into the Draft Tracker (either “Razzball” or “User” Systems recommended).

I don’t think it would be too difficult to add a place on the Draft Entry to input the price a player goes for and therefore track team totals both on the Draft Entry and Standings tabs, and I think I can do so without having to reprogram anything, so I’ll work on it for another update.

I left this off initially because I’m used to just following that stuff on the draft software (on ESPN, for example), but I could see how it would be useful to have right in front of you on the spreadsheet as well, so I’ll see what I can do.

The Draft Tracker has been updated (v2.5) with some Auction Tracking capabilities, so check it out and see if that is close enough to what you had in mind, and let me know if you find any errors as I really haven’t done much testing of it.

——————————————–

For anyone else that is wondering “what the heck is this”, and may have skipped earlier replies, if you’re looking for something similar to the War Room that can handle additional Roto categories, this might be a solution for you.

@ Matt #2: Looks like a good start. You have a gift for design and formatting. However, I was not able to enter any values for auction parameters on the setup page or on the draft page. The fields are grayed out and don’t allow me to type anything in (or pulldown a menu). Are these fields mistakenly being protected, or is there some other place I should be entering this info?

Yeah, sorry, forgot to unlock those cells when I added them (just noticed that myself entering my dynasty league and came here to post). It’s fixed now. Thanks for alerting me though.

I do forsee one little possible glitch with the Auction values and that is the difference in total roster size vs. players entered into the Draft Tracker with the way the formulas are setup to calculate max bid and per player remaining, etc… Probably wouldn’t be much of an issue because by the point that it mattered, everyone would probably be in the $1 per stage or close to it anyways, but something I want to test out a little and come up with a solution if I can.

Don’t get too settle in on the latest one, LOL. Need to look at the potential issue I addressed above and I have several quirks with my dynasty league keeper prices that can’t be easily fixed. Looks decent for a standard league though.

What you can do with an undated version, and it takes like 2-3 minutes, is copy/paste your already entered linueps and the setup stuff into the new version.

Not sure how far along you are, but I just separated the lists by league for you for most of the important players. You’ll have to go through and manually do a few because of some of the spellings (Krispie Young didn’t exactly matchup for example) and to see if there are specific players you want to add, although there are a couple hundred B&P from each league.

Let me know if you want me to post it on Google docs cause I could just insert a few hundred more rows into the Razzball table as well because you really don’t need to have players separated by leagues.

@Matt #2: adding more rows would be perfect! the only reason i was going to separate, was so that i could fit all of the Batters (and pitchers) within the 500 row limit. so if you juice the available rows of the projections systems up to 1,000 we should be able to fit all with out any problems… I’ve been running two dynasty leagues for over 9 years now, and since it’s AL and NL only 12 team leagues, a lot of those players will end up being drafted… your work is greatly appreciated!

@Matt #2: Hey Matt, i used your “Draft League Pak” and simply copy and pasted (values only) into the razzball section, however, when you go to the draft entry screen, it doesn’t seem to be properly valuating the drop down list. It is kind of hard to explain, let me know if you want me to send you a copy of the sheet i am using.

@M.D.: I think I figured it out, it seems that the drop down list on the draft entry screen is still only pulling the first 500 names that you enter in under the razzball projection. So if you enter in all of the names on your draft league pak, the drop down list stops at jose lopez.

@ Matt #2, am loving the spreadsheet but am having just one problem with it. Our auction league salary structure uses .5 increments in salary, and currently I can enter in a .5 increment in the auction tracker slot, but the $ remaining and max bid boxes only reflect whole numbers, thereby leaving my numbers a little off as I attempt to calculate salaries. Is there a way to make the entire worksheet compatible with .5 increments?
Thanks again for all the work, this spreadsheet works great.

Anyone: Sorry if this has been asked before or if I am just being retarded, but on the Auction Draft War Room Spreadsheet, the “Prof 12 Tm” column in grey is blank.
1 – Do we need to populate the data ourselves?
2 – If yes, does the data typed in produce anything on any other tab, cell, etc.?

Thanks for the great draft tool. I was wondering if the player rankings and stat projections are going to be updated before the beginning of the season based on Spring Training job shifts, injuries, etc?

Absolutely fantastic. I wanted to come up with something just like this last year. I just didn’t have enough excel prowess yet. Over last year to this I thought I figured out how to do this and then what do you know, you’ve already done it.
This will be perfect for my draft. Thanks.

@athenian: Try it out on a couple mocks first. I, myself, find it better for ‘balancing my team’ entering the draft (don’t multi-task as well as I used to). Regardless, it is excellent at showing one pluses and minuses of their team.

@M.D.: I picked up switch for A. Gonzalez and Crawford, but don’t remember anything past that. Check the players page to validate. (You can overlay any projections that you like to your saved spreadsheet.)

I am using the 13+ team snake draft and Krispie Young doesn’t get crossed off the list on the Dashboard and the War Room says there is one less player taken than there should be. Tried changing his name to “Chris B Young” and “Young, Chris B” to no avail. I do not see where to change the function in the cell. Any help would be much appreciated!

@Sean A: @Sean A.: I see on the War Room page there are 2 (two) versions of the Auction Draft War Room available for download. There is one labeled “Auction Draft”, and another labeled “Point Shares Auction Values included”.

On the “Auction Draft” spreadsheet, yes, the “Proj 12 Tm” (in grey) is blank. You may populate this column with whatever data you’d like and it will not impact any of the existing formulas – nor will it appear in cells elsewhere on the spreadsheet.

On the “Point Shares Auction Values included” sheet, I included the projected dollar values for players according to Razzball Point Shares (in gray). There is no “Proj 12 Tm” column on this sheet.

I hope this clarifies things for you – let me know if you have any further questions. I’ll monitor this comments section… Sorry for the delay!

war room questions from an excel simpleton.
#1 On War Room tab, on pitching ranks, under ERA and WHIP I get a DIV/0 error. Someone mentioned to
“unhide column AY. When you see all the extra teams, select them all and choose, “delete and shift cells up” on the players tab. AY is not hidden on mine and there is nothing there.

#2 My auction league has a different starting $ for many in the league. Is there a way to easily customize?

#3 I love the values (Razzball and 180/80 but inflation is huge in my league. Is there a rule of thumb like add $30 to all batters that I could manually input?
#4 Not yet but I am planning ahead! :)
Thank you to all of you excel lent razzballers for all your help.

@MAC DADDY: 1) I don’t know if I’ll be of much help, but which spreadsheet did you download? (there are multiple versions available, above)

2) If I understand your question correctly, I think the spreadsheet can only accomodate the same budget for every team. This amount can be customized in the “User Input” tab, but I think needs to stay the same for every team. One workaround MIGHT be to create a dummy roster spot and player for each team; each team could salary that player to properly reflect how much starting $ the team should have for your auction. For instance, let’s say my team needs to start with $70 less than others. Before the auction, have my team spend $70 on some player that no one else will buy. Say, Tom Glavine – who is, I just now saw, on the list of pitchers. Just be sure to expand rosters by 1 for everyone and assign players accordingly.

3) If it’s going to be a uniform increase, shouldn’t be too difficult. You could create another column right next to the Razzball values. In this column, make a formula that adds 30 to the adjacent cell (the Razzball values). It might look like:

=H3+30

Now that cell in your new column will be the Razzball value +$30 for that player. Hope this helps…

@ Peter
Thanks for the input. I had not thought of the dummy roster spot. Wouldn’t that throw off players available etc on the top of the sheet?

I think I have the point shares and auction values version.
I don’t know if +30 works for inflation I was just curious. I think the way things are going to go down that +30 will not be enough for Pujols and Halladay (maybe $70-80 will buy them)but will be too much for most of the rosters….. guess I will have to wing that one.
Thank you!

@MAC DADDY: I don’t know if I understand the question. But I don’t think it’ll throw off available players; just now, I scrolled to to the bottom of the hitters listed on the players tab… on the first line where there was no player, I assigned my team the absent player for $50. It properly impacted my Salaries, Finances and “# of players left” on the War Room tab. If you’re concerned about unduly impacting the “# of players left” section, you’ll have to plan for this and adjust the “User Input” tab. Just add an extra batter in the purple, “Team Budget” section of that tab. Remember: if you do this, I think you’ll need to give EVERY team a dummy player – not just yours. Based on what it is I think you’re trying to do, each team’s dummy/blank player will have a different value in order to impact the team’s budget, accordingly. Helpful, I hope?

@Freddy: Sorry, by “reserve spot” do you mean creating a dummy hitter like MAC DADDY? If so, you’ll have to add a dummy player with exactly the same projected stats (probably best to use league avg #s) for every team, so it’s balanced.

BTW: If you want to tabulate cat totals for your team, the War Room can do that quickly for you. Just go to the players tab. The owner’s column has team ‘a’ already available in the dropdowns. Just go to each player on your team and assign the ‘a’. Then if you go to the War Room page, you will see all of the cat totals.

This is an easy way to change out individual players to ‘balance’ your team

@Matt Damon: Inflation – any recommendations on distributing the inflation (“extra value”) across the pool of players?
Is it likely that many $1-$5 players won’t really see a big spike; rather, the top & middle tiers may see a larger increase than the lower tiers?